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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
Inga Stone
Baraldi, Gabriele d’Annunzio
Gabriele d’Annunzio Baraldi (1938-2002) was Italian by birth but moved to Brazil’s São Paulo until his death. He did much to publicise the incredible range of artifacts left by the many ancient civilisations that existed in Brazil. Among those remains is the remarkable Ingá Stone, which is covered with petroglyphs for its entire 24-metre length. Baraldi claims that the locality was a Hittite colony and that a Hittite empire had existed in Brazil(c). Huari Roman links the Ingá Stone with Atlantean refugees from sunken Atlantis in the Atlantic. He also associates Ingá with Inca! [1127.222]
In 1983 Baraldi gave a newspaper interview in which he claimed that there was evidence for Atlantis to be found “Under the rocks of the National Park of Seven Cities, which is 26 miles from Piripiri Piauí” in northeast Brazil(a)(b).
>In August 2023, Kristen Callihan published an article about the Ingá Stone on the Ancient Origins website outlining the theories currently offered to explain its purpose and origin. It notes that Baraldi identified 497 symbols on the Stone and the surrounding area. An 18th-century proposal that the symbols were similar to early Phoenician carvings came from Fr. Ignatius Rolim. Similarly, Ludwig Schwennhagen also perceived similarities with the Phoenician as well as ancient Egyptian demotic writing. The lunatic fringe has not missed an opportunity to suggest a possible extraterrestrial involvement(f).<
The Ingá Stone
There is now a website dedicated to Baraldi’s work(d), as well as an e-book, in Italian, Un archeologo sulle tracce di Atlantide, which can be downloaded.(e)
(c) https://brazilweirdnews.blogspot.ie/2012/09/the-miystery-of-ingas-stone.html
(d) https://web.archive.org/web/20200322232943/http://www.gabrielebaraldi.arq.br/
(e) https://www.scribd.com/document/29677685/eBook-G-D-Baraldi-Un-archeologo-sulle-tracce-di-Atlantide
(f) https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-writings/inga-stone-006442 *
Easter Island
Easter Island (Rapa Nui) with its strange statues, known as moai, remains one of the great archaeological mysteries. As with most ancient enigmas, various writers have tried to link Easter Island with either Atlantis, Mu or extraterrestrials.
Herbie Brennan in his early book, Occult Reich [027], touched on the subject of Lemuria with the following two gems, “Atlantis, in earliest times, was actually part of Lemuria” and “the degenerate line of Lemuria is still with us, although only just and obviously dying. It is represented by the primitive aborigine of Australia.” He also claimed that a volcanic upheaval brought a tiny speck of Lemuria to the surface. “It rose complete with a host of giant statues……..now known as Easter Island.”
I cannot subscribe to such silliness and would not normally include Easter Island in this encyclopedia, but in recognition of the level of general interest in the subject, I have included a link(a) to the serious archaeological work that continues on the island. This study is now in its fifth season and is directed by Dr Jo Anne Van Tilburg. One aspect of the work was to demonstrate that many of the Easter Island ‘heads’ have buried bodies, often, until now, with hidden petroglyphs(t). A recent (June 2015) blog(g) has proposed that some of the markings represent tattoos.
Van Tilburg has been working on Rapa Nui for more than three decades. Her Easter Island Statue Project is supported in part by UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. “A 2019 report from her radically alters the idea that all standing statues in the Rano Raraku quarry were simply awaiting transport out of the quarry,” Van Tilburg said. “That is, these and probably other upright Moai in Rano Raraku were retained in place to ensure the sacred nature of the quarry itself. The Moai were central to the idea of fertility, and in Rapanui belief, their presence here stimulated agricultural food production.”(aa)
>The moai story is not quite finished yet. A previously unknown statue was discovered in a dried-up lake on the island in 2023(aj).<
The other great Easter Island mystery(i) is the rongorongo script found there. All attempts to decipher it have failed(c)(d). An extensive article by Jacob Mikanowski offering insights into the history of the island and its script and the many efforts to decode it is available online(q). David Pratt has also compared rongorongo with ancient Chinese and Indus Valley scripts(r). Pratt has written several papers on various aspects of Easter Island(s).
Jean-Michel Schwartz has noted [1792.93] the views of Dr Heine Geldern who “pointed out strong resemblances between rongo-rongo signs and certain archaic Chinese characters, particularly from the Shang period.”
Similarities between rongorongo and symbols carved on the Ingá Stone in Brazil have also been noted(v).
Some years ago Andis Kaulins wrote An Astrological Zodiac In the Script of Easter Island(x), in which he also links the Easter Island script with the Indus Valley as well as possible calendrical and astronomical associations.
“In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy was the first academic to suggest a link between Rongorongo and the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. For a while, the idea was entertained and debated until radiocarbon dating of the Indus Valley culture was placed between c. 3,300 – 1,900 BC, a finding which officially separated the two cultures by over 2,000 years. Recent research, however, has opened the debate again as the finding of Indus Valley DNA in Australian Aborigines suggests contact between the two cultures c. 2,000 BC.”(v) There is also an extensive study of the two scripts available on the Academia.edu website.(w)
Although a link between the Indus Valley or even the Chinese cannot be ruled out, the suggestion by Professor Nors Sigurd Josephson that there is a possible Greek connection with Easter Island does appear to be extreme. Nevertheless, he claims that “In parallel with the over one thousand ancient Greek linguistic roots that are met in the language of Easter Island and, the relative to it, Polynesian languages, we also meet a big number of ancient Greek grammatic peculiarities, like noun endings and verbal types” [1904][1905].
More recently (2021), Alexandros Angelis has endorsed Josephson’s idea and for good measure has suggested a linkage between the Greek and Aztec languages(ae).
A new suggestion has recently emerged linking Easter Island and the ongoing discoveries at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey(b). This dates back to early 
2010 and has now been given greater prominence in Robert Schoch’s recent book, Forgotten Civilization [867]. On a lighter note, when Robert Schoch, suggested a link between Göbekli Tepe and Easter Island(m), despite the eleven millennia time difference, it was no surprise that Jason Colavito scornfully dismissed the idea(n) >as well as Schoch’s wild suggestion that the rongorongo writing dates back 12,000 years(ai).<
Pre-Colonial contacts between Easter Island and South America have recently been supported by DNA evidence(f). This would appear to be contradicted by a 2017 study by a team from the University of California -Santa Cruz, which appears to rule out pre-European contact with South Americans! Details are published in the October 12th edition of Current Biology.(p)
The Milwaukee Journal of June 17th, 1923 had a headline that announced the disappearance of Easter Island(e), proving that you really can’t believe everything you read! Coincidentally, 1923 also gave us an early attempt(h) to link Easter Island with Atlantis.
For a long time, it has been thought that warfare had wiped out much of its early population. This has now been debunked by a new study, led by Binghamton University anthropology professor Carl Lipo and published in the Feb. 2016 edition of the journal Antiquity(j). Shortly afterward, a further study suggested a more complex explanation for the early social collapse on the island has been put forward by Dr Valentí Rull, who is a senior researcher at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona(k).
A further report(o) from Lipo highlighted further the complexity underlying the societal disintegration that took place on the island. Lipo outlined the commonly held explanation as follows; “One of the resources that they supposedly used up was trees that were growing on the island. Those trees provided canoes and, as a result of the lack of canoes, they could no longer fish. So they started to rely more and more on land food. As they relied on land food, productivity went down because of soil erosion, which led to crop failures…Painting the picture of this sort of catastrophe. That’s the traditional narrative.” Lipo’s studies have employed new technologies that have disproved these popular ideas and forced a radical rethink.
There is a brief Smithsonian video clip available(l) that deals with the cutting and transportation of the moai.
The latest moai theory has come from a team of researchers, led by Carl Lipo, from New York’s Binghampton University, who have concluded that the statues were placed at locations where potable water was available(u). To me, it seems an excessively elaborate way of marking locations.
A recent study has added some confusion to conventional assumptions regarding early warfare on the island, claiming that there is evidence now that “Easter Island society did not collapse prior to European contact and its people continued to build its iconic moai statues for much longer than previously believed, according to a team of American researchers” Their conclusions were published in the February 2020 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.(y)
Joseph Davidovits who controversially proposed that Giza’s Great Pyramid stones had been cast rather than carved has also claimed that other well-known structures had been created in a similar manner, such as at Tiwanaku and Puma Punku in Peru(ac) and Easter Island(ad). Davidovits also offers a video justifying these claims(ag).
In the April 2020 edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, Lipo et al offered a new paper(z) further debunking the Rapa Nui societal collapse theory and 2021 saw the collapse theory under further attack(ab).
In 2022 the proposed connection between the Easter Island and the Indus scripts was given a further airing. This time, the author Daniel F. Salas introduces this lengthy paper with ” The Indus Valley script glyphs have a visual relationship with the star constellations along the ecliptic. The Indus script has an established visual relationship with the Polynesian Easter Island script. The Polynesians used the stars to navigate, the use of the same pictorial image of the stars points to a very old navigational system. As for the Polynesian script a seasonal date can be found, using the same navigational system it can be said it happens in the Indus valley script. These dates for the Indus Valley script indicate a season of harvest of a particular plant.”(af)
Also in 2022, a BBC article by Sarah Brown offered the latest ideas on how the moai were moved from the quarry to their final location. There appears to be some agreement that the method used is described by Brown as “the marriage of ingenious design and flawless sculpting, which enabled these humanlike statues to stand upright and rock forward from side-to-side while being guided by ropes, granting the statues the ability to ‘walk’.”(ah)
(b) https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=176228
(c) https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387982418/deniartsystems
(d) https://www.boloji.com/articles/14555/deciphering-rongorongo
(e) https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19230617&id=9f1EAAAAIBAJ&sjid=XyEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5420,3683626 (inaccessible Sept. 2016)
(h) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/139600431?searchTerm=Atlantis discovered&searchLimits=
(i) https://www.damninteresting.com/the-other-mystery-of-easter-island/
(k) https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/f-wrh040716.php
(l) How Were Easter Island’s Gigantic Statues Actually Carved? | Smithsonian Magazine (archive.org)
(m) https://web.archive.org/web/20160911175943/https://www.robertschoch.com/articles/schochgobeklitepenewdawnsept2010.pdf See: Sept/Oct 2010 edition of New Dawn Magazine (Issue 122)
(p) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/easter-island-dna-south-america.html
(q) https://web.archive.org/web/20200508065544/http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/64/mikanowski.php
(r) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/eastern_island/easter03.htm#7._Rongorongo_
(s) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/eastern_island/easter.htm
(w) https://www.academia.edu/2384225/Rongorongo_and_the_Indus_Script
(x) https://easterislandscript.blogspot.com/2010/01/astrological-zodiac-in-script-of-easter.html
(z) Rethinking Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” of Easter Island – Anthropology.net (archive.org)
(aa) https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/easter-island-moai-0013007
(ab) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713090153.htm
(ac) https://www.geopolymer.org/archaeology/tiahuanaco-monuments-tiwanaku-pumapunku-bolivia/
(ad) https://www.geopolymer.org/library/video/they-came-from-america-to-build-easter-island/
(ae) https://grahamhancock.com/angelisa1/
(ag) https://www.geopolymer.org/library/video/they-came-from-america-to-build-easter-island/
(ah) The ‘walking’ statues of Easter Island – BBC Travel
(aj) New Moai statue that ‘deified ancestors’ found on Easter Island | Live Science *
Huari Román, Americo
Americo Huari Román (1950 – ) is a Peruvian electrical engineer who was 
born in the former Inca capital of Cuzco. He is the author of La Atlantida y el Imperio de los Incas (Atlantis and the Empire of the Incas)[1127]. This is a bilingual book with a somewhat flawed English translation.
He contends that originally Atlantis had been an island in the Atlantic from where their influence spread to the the cultures of Europe, Africa and South America.Huari enters the realms of speculation with the wild claim that the Atlanteans used some form of levitation using anti-gravity fields! At the same time he also claims that they did not have the wheel as they did not need it! He quotes Blavatsky and other theosophists and psychics, which is probably where he got his ideas of advanced technology in Atlantis that is comparable with our own.
Even more disappointing for me was Huari’s failure to address Plato’s account, in particular the control of the Western Mediterranean by the Atlanteans from North Africa northward as far as modern Tuscany, and does not adequately explain the war with Egypt, if, as he claims[p.211] it was already an Atlantean colony!
Before the Great Deluge, Huari claims that most of central Brazil had been a huge inland sea and that Atlanteans and Arawaks lived around this lake and that one artifact left by them is the enormous carved Ingá Stone(c).
After the Deluge a cataclysm inundated Atlantis and Brazil rose 100 metres, which got rid of the inland sea. Some groups fled to the Andean highlands of Peru, eventually developing the Empire of Tiwanaku which later morphed into the Incan Empire.
Huari supports his views with a number of video clips (a) which unfortunately are only in Spanish. Huari published a new video(b) in July 2014.
(a) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVzhBgn_am8
Homet, Marcel F.
Marcel F. Homet (1897-1982) was a famous French Algerian scientist who published over twenty books 
on anthropology, ethnology and ancient history generally. His most famous book is Sons of the Sun[813] in which he discussed his work in South America where he found evidence of Old World connections, in particular, on the famous Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock)(a) in Brazil, in a region that provides evidence of human activity there as early as 40,000 years ago, although, because of the acidic soil the earliest human bones are dated to 12,000 years ago(b). Some of the Pedra Pintada images have been claimed to represent UFOs!
>Just as mysterious is the Brazilian Ingá Stone with its astonlshing collection of carved symbols. One researcher Gabriele Baraldi has interpreted the carvings as evidence of a Hittite presence in Brazil(f).
A 2023 article draws attention to another site in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state known as the Santa Elina rock shelter, where evidence of human activity has been dated to 25,000 years ago(e).<
The title of Homet’s book is his name for Atlanteans. Homet believed that Atlantis had been located in the Atlantic and was part of a landbridge linking Europe and the Americas, an idea that was still popular when he was a child but abandoned long since. Homet contended that refugees fleeing its destruction had escaped to both of those continents. He linked “tools, inscriptions, cults and monuments in both Crete and Egypt on the one hand with the Amazon regions on the other.”
A review of his book is available on the Atlantisforschung website(d).
The final chapter in Homet’s book is devoted to the Phaistos Disk, which he claims to be Atlantean. He continually points out aspects of the ideograms stamped on it that have counterparts in various pre-Columbian cultures. “The totality of the ideograms or symbols on the disc – they are all as familiar in the prehistoric Mediterranean countries as in Ancient America (although of older date there) – leads us inevitably to search for a common origin, which can only be found in the northern part of the space which lies between the two continents (Eurasia and America), in other words: Atlantis!” [p193]
Atlantisforschung lamented the fact that following his death and after a life gathering research material, most was lost or disappeared(c).
(a) Archive 2218
(b) BRASILE PREISTORICO (archive.org)
(c) Marcel F. Homet – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(d) Marcel F. Homet, Atlantis and the Sons of the Sun – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(f) https://brazilweirdnews.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-miystery-of-ingas-stone.html *
Brazil
Brazil was arguably (re)discovered by the Pinzon brothers, before Columbus first reached the West Indies according to Steven Sora(g). However, it is more generally accepted, particularly by Brazilians, that the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral was the first European to discover Brazil in 1500.
Brazil has had few serious investigators propose it as the location of Atlantis. Although, in 1947 Harold T. Wilkins claimed[0363.97] that Quetzalcoatl was from Atlantean Brazil. Earlier in the 20th century, Col. P.H. Fawcett, the famous explorer, disappeared while searching in the Brazilian rain forest for a ‘lost city’ that he called ‘Z’. A 2009 book by David Grann about Fawcett’s searches in Brazil, entitled The Lost City of Z [0772] was the basis for a film released in 2016. Sprague de Camp listed[0194.329] a George Lynch supporting a Brazilian Atlantis in 1925. In fact, Lynch was a fund-raiser for Fawcett. However, the Atlantisforschung website is adamant that there is no evidence that Lynch favoured Brazil as the location of Atlantis(i)!
However, although there is growing evidence of ancient roads, plazas and bridges in Brazil’s vast tropical forests, further data is needed before we can attempt to fit these structures into any specific culture or chronology.
An article(e) in the August 2017 edition of Antiquity offers evidence that humans lived in Brazil more than 20,000 years ago, which is many millennia before the Clovis people arrived in North America.Americo Huari Román is a Peruvian electrical engineer who was born in the former Inca capital of Cuzco. He is the author of La Atlantida y el Imperio de los Incas (Atlantis and the Empire of the Incas) [1448]. Before the Great Deluge, Huari claims that most of central Brazil had been a huge inland sea and that Atlanteans and Arawacs lived around this lake and that the one artefact left by them is the enormous carved Ingá Stone(j).
The possibility of Phoenician contact with Brazil has a number of supporters and a range of websites supports this controversial view(a). One such advocate, Ronald Barney, maintains[1185] that they concentrated their influence in the northeastern region of the country citing the work of Ludwig Schwennhagen[1550] and Apollinaire Frot(f).
There would appear to be evidence for 3rd century AD Roman contact with Brazil(h). The 1982 discovery of Roman amphorae in a shipwreck in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, 15 miles offshore in 100 feet of water. This was badly received locally as it dispensed with the claim for Pedro Alvares Cabral having been the first European to land in Brazil(k)(l). The large number of amphorae found in the wreck would seem to indicate that their cargo had not been offloaded and as it was located 15 miles offshore, we have no reason to think that the ship ever reached land. I would speculate that the Guanabara wreck was simply blown of course while on a trading mission.
Whether other Roman vessels reached America with greater success is a more contentious matter. A variety of Roman artifacts have been discovered since the early nineteenth century, at various locations in America, inciting what was often furious debate(m)(n)(o). If the Romans had established links with the Americas, I find it hard to accept that they would not have broadcast the fact, if only to inflate their imperial ego!
May 2013 saw a flurry of media interest when a Japanese submersible found evidence in the form of granite suggesting of a previously unknown continental mass that sank about 900 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Members of the expedition have played down any attempt to link this discovery with Atlantis(b)(c).
This reminiscent of the reaction in 1931 when two islands were reported to have emerged from the sea off Brazil and within a short time, claims that they were a returning Atlantis were widely quoted(d).
Any suggestion that the land of Hy-Brasil in Irish mythology has any connection with Brazil or Atlantis is just wild speculation.
(a) https://phoenicia.org/brazil.html
(c) https://www.counselheal.com/articles/5276/20130507/scientists-found-atlantis-coast-brazil.htm
(d) https://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/98134066?searchTerm=Atlantis&searchLimits=
(e) https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/stone-age-people-brazil-20000-years-ago
(g) See: Archive 3480
(h) The Mysterious Ancient Underwater Roman Relics of Brazil | Mysterious Universe (archive.org) *
(i) George Lynch – Atlantisforschung.de (atlantisforschung-de.translate.goog)
(l) ‘Roman’ jars found in Guanabara Bay could re-write Brazil’s history | indy100
(m) Did Ancient Romans Reach The Americas Long Before Columbus? – Ancient Pages
(n) An Expert Doubts Roman Coins Found in U.S. Are Sea?Link Clue – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
(o) Mysterious jars found in Brazil offer world-changing version of history (msn.com) *